


is it gay to love the holy?

by getbreqed



Series: unfortunately stalled tlt works [2]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Orgasm Denial, St Theresa Au, Time Travel, harrow is depressed and a child, lack of sleep as self harm?, not for the sexy stuff for that she's older and off with the lyctors, not htn compliant, worship vibes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:14:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29352558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getbreqed/pseuds/getbreqed
Summary: “I pray the tomb will open,” said Harrowhark, “I pray the rock will roll away. I pray that which was buried will be raised again, awakened, in perpetual life with open eye and active mind. I pray it lives, I pray it wakes … I pray for the downfall of the Emperor Condemning, the Doomed King, his Lyctors and his men. I pray for the fall of the Second House, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth; the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. I pray for the Ninth House, and I pray for it to fail in its duties. I pray for the soldiers and adepts far from home, and all those parts of the Empire that live in unrest and disquiet. Let it be so.”
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Tomb Girl, Tomb Girl/Gideon Nav
Series: unfortunately stalled tlt works [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2156118
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. you know that girl who made you gay?

**Author's Note:**

> this is an au created to facilitate harrow having sexy worshipful dreams about tomb girl. i have a whole plot and everything but it has been stubbornly refusing getting written. also i don't know if i can write things that aren't an immediate scene

When the girl from the tomb appears in her dreams, Harrow is grateful in a way she’s never been before.

She’s so small, and she feels it sometimes. She’s so small and skeletons dance under her fingertips. She’s so small to walk the bodies of her parents beside her, to carefully arrange them in their rooms every night, to pour over ancient tomes to find out how to make her parents seem more alive.

She’s big enough to hold the weight of the ninth, though. She’s big enough, she has to be big enough, or else all of the future of the ninth that she burns with is for naught. So she leads worship and sits with her parents and her aunts to “watch them” settle the petty disputes of the day. She is granted small bows and “Reverend Daughter”s. She does not buckle, and she does not fail.

But she is not enough for the Ninth. She, its center, does not fit. She opened the locked tomb; she didn’t walk out an airlock, she didn’t hang herself, she didn’t do anything but live, which has always been her greatest crime.

If only Griddle had given her any fucking time. Couldn’t she have picked that day of all days to be playing with her sword somewhere away from Harrow?

The girl in the tomb - she shook something in Harrow. Before she had wanted to see the danger that must be contained, we pray that the tomb remains locked, we pray that the rock will never roll away, but now she thought of the tomb opening with longing, the girl emerging from the tomb as terrible in her loveliness.

***

She first sees that face again in dreams tangled up with pain and failure and her parents smiling kindly as they twisted her patient noose for her, the girl in the tomb a joy that cuts parallel to the pain and fear of her parents not understanding her to their deaths. Sometimes she is the girl in the tomb in these dreams, cold and shackled and so alive even in icy repose that the mere velocity of her own possibility electrifies her completely.

The first time she really sees the woman in the tomb in her dreams, Harrow is again standing before the captive on the altar. The girl turns her head towards Harrow and then opens her eyes, and Harrow is seen in a way she’s never been before. She is abruptly terrified by the weight of this attention.

It wakes her up completely, adrenaline rushing through her and coming out as a laugh that tears out of her throat and resolves into hoarse hiccoughing barks.

She doesn’t know why she had expected the girl in the tomb to have Griddle’s striking amber eyes. They might have similar features, she supposes, but Gideon’s preeteen gangly and has acne and is takes up as much space as possibly can in the most infuriating way possible, and the girl in the tomb has such magnetism even asleep that even after all that happened because of it Harrow can’t regret opening the tomb.

Also the girl in the tomb has arms that make Griddle’s look like matchsticks.

For weeks afterward whenever her mind isn’t absolutely as busy as it could be, the memory of the girl in the tomb’s eyes seeing her pops to the front of her mind. They were Griddle’s amber around the edges of the irises and deepened further to black in the middle, not flat black like Harrow’s eyes but iridescent, flickering rainbow in the dim light refracted by the ice. They have an ageless impatience in them that promise action in a way that sends anticipatory shivers down Harrow’s spine.

***

Harrow walks on the wheel of the Ninth, keeps it turning. A year passes. Another. Every day a day closer to her majority, when her parents can be declared dead and she no longer has to move them along with her. Every day a day closer to when she has nothing to remember them by but her nightmares and their bones among the skeletons of the Ninth. That day may have already come, although she tends to their bodies daily.

The first year, that first dream is the only time that the girl in the tomb opens her eyes. That memory sustains her in her day to day, through dark valleys between research and thwarting Griddle’s clumsy escape attempts, which were always good for a laugh. 

Sometimes, in that year, she dreams of the girl in the tomb and she seems as static as she truly was in life, immoble in her sepulchre of ice and stone, and those feel like blessed memory. The opposite of nightmare. But other times-

Other times she feels the presence of the girl in the tomb like cool sparking static sinking into her skin. Other times she can see her eyes move behind their lids and her hands crack and flex on her sword. Other times she can feel that this girl in the tomb, this girl in her dreams, is alive and is moving.

The nights where she sees this realer girl in the tomb she wakes up immediately after, buzzing with undirected purpose. Her tired flesh cannot contain the way her soul soars and she mourns that her body couldn’t resist wakefulness to allow her to stand witness for even a single second more.

She serves the Ninth and she thwarts Gideon and she is granted dreams of the tomb. This is her eleventh year.

***

The second year, Harrow’s twelfth, the tomb begins to melt. 

In this year, Harrowhark is aware of herself in these dreams. She has a body, she can move - it’s like when all of the power in the room is centered the ice rather than the girl in the tomb’s growing awareness, Harrow has room to have a body, and she wants to do nothing with it but witness.

It doesn’t hurt to be in the tomb in her dreams, it doesn't make her hurt and gasp and drag her body along like an accessory to her seeing eyes as it had in life. The cold doesn’t burn her, it doesn’t arrest the breath in her lungs - In her dreams it only hurts that the fog rising from the ice obscures the girl in the tomb from her sight. It makes her want to weep, but she forces her own eyes at least to be clear. She doesn’t wake so soon in these dreams and it’s both agony and splendor know herself to be in the presence of the resident of the tomb without being able to see her.

Harrow does not even consider trying to touch. Not even to approach. Her brain shies away from the very idea. So she dreams, and the cool fog overflows and curls around her ankles and she wraps her arms around herself and basks in the warmth of the girl of the locked tomb.

When she wakes from these dreams it is not with ecstasy but with soothing wonder, a settled stride and a settled mind. Like she is being reshaped to better fit herself.

Each dream there is less time where the tomb girl’s body is not consumed by fog. Each dream the fog rises faster and more densely. In the fluorescent light of day Harrow covertly scribbles volumetric measurements and burns the flimsies after she’s done. She writes her final answer on her wrist under her sleeve always covers and carries it around with her like a secret talisman until it fades and she is left wanting until the next dream.

The ice is melting faster. The girl in the tomb, the girl in Harrow’s dreams, is getting stronger.

She’s waking up.

***

Time goes on. The dreams of the girl in the tomb are like cool breaths of clean air that sustain Harrow through the other hours of her life. She could learn how to live without the dreams, she thinks, as she could maybe learn to live in the void of space without atmosphere, but she desperately doesn’t want to, constantly worries that they will end. And despite her fear, there is always another dream.

The third year comes, and Harrow is thirteen. 

The third year comes, and the fog swirls around underneath the raised dais in the tomb, leaving the girl in the tomb completely free from the ice packed around her for the first time.

She moves. She moves her whole body, piece by piece, rolling her ankles and flexing her fingers and breathing in a slow, luxurious gasp of air, arching her back until she chokes on the chains around her neck, a small, rasping gasp that throws Harrow back into a wakefulness that’s too big for her being. She opens her mouth wide enough that her jaw cracks, somehow her body’s instinctive response to try and manage feeling so much at once in a way that’s remotely manageable. She feels like she’s glowing from the inside, two bright to be the Ninth, too good to regret anything that brought her here. The next day she laughs at Griddle and she’s going for condescending but from the confused look on Griddle’s face she didn’t quite hit the mark. No matter.

She doesn’t want to go to sleep.

She should want to go to sleep. She doesn’t sleep as long as she should normally, because she has to be better to make all that she is worth something and she has nightmares more than she dreams of the girl in the tomb, but. Next time she sees the girl in the tomb, the girl in the tomb might speak to her. Harrow has never spoken in that space, never made a sound, that silence so different from the relentless murmur of bones at prayer.

But the girl in the tomb had made a noise. She had stretched against chains that cracked with cold and choked when they drew tight against the line of her neck.

What if she spoke to Harrow.

What if she was a disappointment. What if she wasn’t anything that Harrow thought she would be. What if she was angry with Harrow for opening the tomb. Harrow wouldn’t be able to bear it if she had betrayed all that the Ninth taught only to be told that she had laid herself down to release her chains and in releasing her had betrayed her too.

That last one was the one she was most afraid of, and the one that seemed most likely. What could trap that girl and hold her there? Could The Emperor Undying, God that he is, hold her even once if she didn’t want to be held? It seemed unlikely. And what would she say to the girl who was supposed to keep her contained but rolled away the stone for what, for curiosity? For a need for purpose? Harrow would not regret opening the tomb. She couldn’t. She refused.

She still put off sleep for four days. The last day she accepted that she was going to have to pass out at the end of it, set herself a goal and dragged herself through a few more hours that way. Griddle looked as if she was gearing up for escape attempt number twenty but that’s fine, she could deal with it tomorrow. Just one step after another until the end comes.

When she fell into bed like a stone that night, she opened her eyes to the first bell with no dreams in between. She cries, then, and even after that she keeps pausing when putting on her face to heave deep breaths and squeeze her eyes shut to keep the tears in, which screws up her makeup anyway.

Annoying. Awful. Terrible. 

There’s nothing she can do about it. She doesn’t even know what she would do if she could.

Griddle finds her before the next dream does, corners her when she’s walking up and down the stairs just to have something to do. She hangs back, giving Harrow a wide berth, but isn’t scared off by her glare or the fact that she doesn’t stop walking. Pity.

She looks like she regrets what she’s about to say already, which in Harrow’s opinion was a look she should wear more often.

“Are we all going to die, or something?” she finally demands, eyes shifting off Harrow to skitter along the dark wall.

Harrow sighs. “Yes, Griddle, we’re all going to die,” she says. “You’re going to die and they will take your flesh for soap and brush the oss from your bones, and you will serve the Ninth in that too.”

Harrow feels Griddle bear her teeth. Harrow nods to a nun as she passes, and she nods deeply back. Harrow doesn’t need to look back to feel the dirty look she throws at Griddle.

“Okay,” Gideon says, “but that doesn’t explain why you’re walking up and down these fucking stairs instead of trying to fuse yourself with an old-ass book made of human skin.”

“Oh, Griddle,” she said, “Maybe someday your powers of observation will develop past those of a two year old child. I’m not that kind of necromancer. I do things with skeletons, not skin. Oh of course, I shouldn’t have assumed. Do you know what skeletons are? Skel-e-ton-“

“Of couse I know what a skeleton is, Harrow, what the fuck,” Griddle says. “I just didn’t know you knew how to leave the library without being forced. Didn’t know you could do any form of physical activity without keeling over on the spot.”

She wasn’t at the library because she couldn’t concentrate. She’d tried and thought this might be better, but Griddle was here so obviously not. Obviously not.

“Aw, Griddle, are you going soft on me? Do you care? Are you content to stay by my side forever now?” asks Harrow.

“Fuck off,” says Griddle. Point scored. “If you’re dying or something I have plans. Elaborate plans. Depending on how.”

“Nobody ever said you were subtle,” said Harrow. “I’m not dying, Griddle, don’t worry your little head about it.”

“Fuck me for asking then,” Gideon mumbles. Harrow hears the clank of the metal stairs as she walks away and turns to watch her go, and then heads back to the library. Even if she can’t concentrate with the girl in the tomb’s gasp echoing in her ears, she can hide herself away from Nav’s cloying pity.

***

When she dreams of the girl in the tomb next, Harrow does not run or leave or turn away as the fog swells up around the girl in the tomb and falls around Harrow’s feet. She doesn’t know what would happen if she turned away or tried to leave, because she has never tried either of those things. 

She does find herself praying, though, her brain falling into patterns of by the locked tomb, by that should remain - and by the Emperor Undying, he who entrusted to us stewardship of - and never getting to the substance, which was please, please, let her be enough. Please, please, let me be enough.


	2. here's the meat of the thing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fast forward! flash cut! now harrow is a lyctor and gideon has died :( but guess what... for the first time since the religiously homoerotic incident years ago tomb girl appeared in her dreams once more... and with gideon!

“Lady - God - I -” says Harrow, wishing for once she had Gideon’s repertoire of imaginative titles at hand, to have somewhere to start, anywhere. How to express-?

“You have done me incalculable honor,” she says, “you have - done for me what the emperor could not, service more rare and valuable than anything I’ve held in unworthy hands.”

Gideon makes a stifled noise at that, and the girl in the tomb’s voice is gentle and teasing when she asks “And what of your cavalier's service? Was her life so much ash and dust?”

At this Gideon makes a noise clearly in Harrow’s defence. “Gideon’s… Gideon has restored the Ninth, made me into one of the Emperor’s sainted lyctors, saved my life, all in one act.” she says. “That single act was also the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to me in my entire life.”

“She will only be present as I am present, in your dreams,” says the girl of the tomb. “In waking she is with you as I am not, but nowhere that you can speak. Nowhere you can touch. This is not the true resurrection you desire, Harrowhark Nonagesimus.”

“It is not nothing,” Harrow says. She closes her eyes and can feel the weight of both their eyes on her. If her eyes are wet she lets no tears fall. “You have given me a universe without the absence of her. The worth of that is incalculable.”

When she opens her eyes the girl in the tomb is smiling a strange gentle smile but she’s captured by Gideon’s wide eyes.

“Harrow…” she says and Harrow is struck again by how cruel she has been that Gideon would disbelieve her own value.

“Gideon,” says the girl in the tomb.

“Yeah?” says Gideon, still blinking dumbly.

She holds out a hand. “Come here. I have a gift for your lady, and I would have you deliver it.”

“I,” says Gideon. “yeah, sure. Okay.”

She stands and brushes off her knees. “Do you two just stay here all night just talking like the eighth jacking off to the emperor?” she says. “It’s not bad or anything just. Wow.”

The girl in the tomb smiles. “Come,” she says, and gestures towards where she sits on her altar.

Harrow hadn’t realized she was worried about tomb girl disapproving of Gideon’s… Gideoness until she was swamped with relief at the girl in the tomb’s tolerant smile as Gideon stumbles over.

The girl in the tomb glances over at Harrow and reaches out to guide Gideon where to stand. She’s positioned them so that Harrow can see both of their profiles and like this Harrow can appreciate that they really are pretty much identical, except for the eyes, and then her brain does a hop skip and a jump when the girl in the tomb touches Gideon’s chin and guides her in for a kiss, just as she had done to Harrow before Canaan house.

Then the girl in the tomb slides her hand back up Gideon’s jaw and into her hair, deepening the kiss.

Harrow takes a half step forwards, only faltering out of the fear that if they notice they’ll  _ stop _ .

It’s not a long kiss, - Gideon’s hands have just started to tentatively move upwards rather than hanging in stupefaction - but it is - it seems - thorough.

When the girl from the tomb draws back, she lets her hand trail along Gideon’s jaw She leans back on her hands and rolls her neck and shoulders.

“Are you willing to deliver my gift to your mistress, a reward to my treasured acolyte?” the girl from the tomb says.

“I don’t -” says Gideon, and Harrow’s heart seizes. “Lady, I’m going to need a little more practice if you expect me to kiss her like  _ that. _ ”

“That’s certainly an idea,” says the girl from the tomb, corner of her lip curling upwards, “but maybe for another night."


	3. two snippers, first one super horny last one plot

“You can’t,” Harrow says, desperate. “Please - you can’t leave me like this, not without - “

“Your flesh is my flesh, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth,” the girl says, her laughing eyes Gideon’s and the girl in the tomb’s both. “You have sworn it to me. And you will not come until I say so.”

The girl’s face breaks open and she laughs and smiles Gideon’s crooked smile. “One flesh one end, bitch” she says. “Isn’t this what you meant?”

Then she cheerfully pushes Harrow out of the dream into her body, shaking and gasping in her bed. She’s sweating and so close to the edge she doesn’t dare reach down to see how wet she is, doesn’t dare even press her legs together, just sprawls out and breathes in and out, in and out until she thinks she can control herself.

“She’s so old, Harrow,” Gideon croons. “She’s sooooo old. Ancient. Geriatric. And she’s me.” 

“What?” says Harrow. “Wait - really?”

“It was weird as hell being in your brain and kind of also in her brain, all perma-dying ghost while both of you had your own real hands and shit, even if hers were frozen,” Gideon says. “I got to know both of you pretty well. In all senses of the word, if you know what i mean. She was me from the future, Harrow.”

“Fucking time shenanigans,” Harrow says, disgusted. “So wait, you’re going to-?”

“She was sad,” says Gideon, interrupting her. “She was like... really sad. She loved you so much, and you were dead, and so she knew it was time. She got to know you and love you all over again, Harrow, and she knew that she was lucky as hell, but she knew she’d never get to touch you again, not in real life. She knew that her Harrow was gone and you were mine. You were always for me. Since the Resurrection. Since the founding of the Ninth. Since she first loved you. Since I love you now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> three girlfriends one body. this predicted all the threesomes in htn because it was written before it, and that is obviously how predictions work. except it's really two girlfriends! who love each other
> 
> gideon obviously goes off to grow immortal old with harrow until harrow dies and gideon's next goal is to go back in time to be the one who kills god, even if she has to wait a super long time to do it.


End file.
